Oklahoma

Wit And Wisdom From T. Boone Pickens

By W.F. Strong

Even before I knew much about T. Boone Pickens, I loved his name. Has there ever been a better name for an oil man than T. Boone Pickens? It’s just right as rain. And the man behind the name was so perfect for it that it disproved Shakespeare’s claim that any other name would work as well. I loved to hear him talk because his Southwestern dialect so perfectly underscored and certified his folk wisdom and humor. He was a chairman of the board with true blue-collar cred. The title of his last book showed he was beautifully grounded in both worlds: “The First Billion is the Hardest.”

Boone, as many called him, was an Oklahoman and a Texan. When asked which he was, he said, “both.” He straddled both states like a giant derrick – raised in both, drilled in both – and both benefited from the hundreds of millions he gave through his philanthropy, from M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, to UT Southwestern Medical Center, and to Oklahoma State University, among others.

Boone Pickens would have certainly died a multi-billionaire had he not given away the majority of his fortune, and he loved giving it away. He said, “Giving away money wasn’t as fun as making it, but it was a close second.”

When he died, he left behind a poignant letter for his social media followers. It contains his humor, his wisdom and inspiring advice for life. I’ll share some of it. He said:

If you are reading this, I have passed on from this world — not as big a deal for you as it was for me.

In my final months, I came to the sad reality that my life really did have a fourth quarter and the clock really would run out on me. I took the time to convey some thoughts that reflect back on my rich and full life.

I was able to amass 1.9 million Linkedin followers. On Twitter, more than 145,000 (thanks, Drake). This is my goodbye to each of you.

You can find more of T. Boone Pickens’ parting words on his web site.

I’ll end with Boone’s most famous bit of advice, not included in his letter:

“Every day you should work eight hours and sleep eight hours. Make sure they’re not the same eight hours.” Now let’s do what Boone would do – get on back to work.

The Mystery Of The Osage Murders

One of the best books I’ve read this year is “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.” I was late to this literary party. This nonfiction work has been a super-bestseller for well over a year now. It has been on the Paperback Nonfiction bestseller list for 49 weeks. Dave Eggers writes in his New York Times Book Review that author “[David] Grann has proved himself a master of spinning delicious, many-layered mysteries that also happen to be true. … It will sear your soul.”

I won’t spoil this book for you by revealing any part of the whodunit. I’m more interested in the who pursued ‘em.

You have three levels of tension here. First, there is the Osage tribe – the richest people per capita on Earth at the time, around 1920. They were the only tribe that owned mineral rights to the worthless land they got from the federal government as their very own reservation in Oklahoma. Why not? It was worthless scrub-brush land that was mostly sandy and rocky with random clumps of grass. When oil was discovered, though, they became, collectively, unfathomably rich. J. Paul Getty, for instance, was in a bidding war Harry Sinclair for Osage oil leases. Soon after the money started piling up, the Osage started dying, mysteriously, and in large numbers.

The second level of tension is that they were being murdered, seemingly randomly. “Serial killer” was not yet a term in the crime lexicon, but as a reader, you arrive at that conclusion quickly. You feel it must be a serial killer. But not one singular method was used. Some Osage were shot, some poisoned, some blown up in their homes with dynamite. Sixty had died by the time that J. Edgar Hoover took the case for the feds. It was up to him to find the killer or killers.

Here’s the third level of tension. Hoover was just acting director of what was called the Bureau of Investigation at the time. He was only 29 years old. The case was a blessing and a curse. If Hoover could solve it he could elevate the this new agency to a formidable and powerful national police bureau. If he failed, he would be pushed out; his career hung in the balance. Hoover was wanting to create an FBI that was modern, full of smart college graduates skilled in the use of the latest scientific techniques like fingerprinting, but the last agents sent to solve the mystery either made no headway, or were themselves killed. To solve this case, Hoover needed to send to Oklahoma the kind of agent he wanted the agency to shed.

Now, at this point you might be saying, as my dear sister-in-law said to me when I told her this story, “Why are you, Mr. Texas, talking about Oklahoma?” I’ll answer you as I did her: “Hold your horses, I’m fixin’ to get there.”

Hoover had to bite the bullet and bring in the cowboys. He sent for Tom White, his bureau chief in Houston, who was an ex-Texas Ranger, to take charge of the case. As Hoover said, “He needed a man who could handle men.”

It wasn’t exactly a “one riot, one ranger” situation, but it had elements of it.

Grann describes him this way: “Tom White was an old-style lawman. He had served in the Texas Rangers near the turn of the century, and he had spent much of his life wandering on horseback across the Southwestern frontier, a Winchester rifle or a pearl-handled six-shooter in hand. He was 6 feet, 4 inches and had the sinewy arms and eerie composure of a gunslinger.

Years later, a bureau agent wrote that he was as “God-fearing as the mighty defenders of the Alamo. He was an impressive sight in his large, suede Stetson. … He commanded the utmost in respect and scared the daylights out of Easterners like me.”

Of course, it was a white Stetson he wore.

Hoover explained to White that he needed him to direct the investigation without a hint of scandal, and as quietly as possible. He told him there could be “no excuse for failure.” Hoover told him to call in as many agents as he needed, and so White called in those men that Hoover considered the cowboys (two were ex-Texas Rangers) – men who were good at “infiltrating wild country, dealing with outlawry, shadowy suspects, going days without sleep, maintaining cover under duress, and handling deadly weapons if necessary.”

So there you go. The plot is set. The characters are in place. A great Texas story awaits, even though it’s set in Oklahoma. If you don’t care to read the book just now, you can wait for the movie, which, rumor has it, will be directed by Martin Scorsese and star Leonardo DiCaprio. De Niro is said to be in talks for a role as well.

I’m W.F. Strong. These are Stories from Texas, by way of Oklahoma. Some of them are true.

Texas Might Have Been Smaller

The Worst Land Survey in U.S. History

By W. F. Strong

You can never underestimate the value of a good friendship forged early in life. If not for such a friendship, Texas would be nearly 1,000 square miles smaller.

Before I get to the friendship, come with me up to the northwest corner of the panhandle where Texas meets Oklahoma and New Mexico. If you were looking at a map you would see that the border between Oklahoma and New Mexico doesn’t meet up exactly with the border between Texas and New Mexico. The line makes a jog to the left. It goes 2.3 miles left before heading straight south. That jog is the result of a survey error that some have called the worst survey error in U.S. history. But it isn’t just a two mile error – that error gets bigger as it continues south 310 miles to the bottom Texas-New Mexico corner, where it turns west and heads for El Paso. All total the mistake amounts to a 942 square mile error, a land mass bigger than Houston, though long and skinny, like a gerrymandered voting district.

In truth, that land should have gone to New Mexico. That was what was supposed to happen when Texas sold off its northern and western territories for ten million dollars in 1850. The border between Texas and the New Mexico Territory was to be exactly along the 103rd Meridian. When the official survey was undertaken, almost ten years later, there was a problem with water,, Indians, stars, algebra and math, which all contributed to the error that ended up a blessing for Texas.

Naturally, there’s quite a good long story behind the mistake. It is far too complex for these few minutes. I will give you the “cut to the chase version.”

A man named John H. Clark was hired to do the survey and plant the monuments along the 103rd meridian. He started from the south and surveyed northward until he ran out of access to water. So he stopped and said, “I’ll just go up to the north end of Texas and come down.” So he did.

Clark started again northwest of present day Dalhart and headed south until the native Americans frightened him off. Though he was about 70 miles from connecting his two lines, he figured it was good enough and turned in his work. His two lines wouldn’t have intersected anyway. The problem was his northern starting point was about 2.3 miles west of where it should have been and his southern corner was nearly 3.8 miles west of where it should have been. Consequently, that border slides imperceptibly 1 ½ miles ever so gently southwest over a distance of 310 miles. Pull up a google map on your phone and align the southeastern corner of New Mexico with your left straight-edge phone border. You will see that the border slants off to the right up at the top. That’s the error. It amounts to 603,348 acres. About ¾ the size of the King Ranch.

Well, nobody knew it was wrong and so the bad survey based on poor calculations was certified by the U.S. in 1891 and it became the legal boundary.

By the time New Mexico was about to get statehood with the Enabling Act of 1910, it had become aware of Clark’s error and slipped into the statehood law a clause saying that the eastern boundary would be the true 103rd meridian. New Mexico would get its land back. All was going well and nobody was paying attention to the land grab except for John Farwell, who was an original investor in the XIT ranch. Those were the same investors who essentially built our state capital in Austin. Well, he realized that the XIT would lose hundreds of thousands of acres (and mineral rights) if the New Mexico plan went through as it was.

He couldn’t get any legislators to listen and so he did what we all do in times of trouble: he said, “Who do I know?” Just so happened that he knew President William Howard Taft. They had been good friends during their college years at Yale. So he went to see his old buddy, Howard. He explained the predicament and Taft immediately summoned powerful men to his office and told them that the Clark border would be the legal border when New Mexico was made a state or it wouldn’t be made one. He said that since the boundary had existed for more than fifty years, and had been certified 20 years before, it had to be grandfathered in. Otherwise, people who believed they were Texans would suddenly be in New Mexico and litigation over land titles would never end.

And that is how a survey error, and an old friendship ended up making Texas almost a thousand square miles bigger than it was supposed to be. Once again, it’s all about who you know.

A final note of interest. There is a town out in the Panhandle called Farwell, Texas. It’s just a few feet on the Texas side of the border with New Mexico. It is named after John Farwell. Had he failed to convince Taft to keep the old border line, the town named for him would have become Farwell, New Mexico.

Sources:

Brock, Ralph H. “Perhaps the Most Incorrect of any Land Survey in the United States”
Southern Historical Quarterly, April 2006, pp. 431-462.

Haley, J. Evets. The XIT Ranch of Texas and the Early Days of the Llano Estacado, University of Oklahoma Press, 1953.

Hoover, Mike. “The Southeast Corner of New Mexico.” The Texas Surveyor, May, 2015, pp. 16-23.

Texas Standard: July 11, 2017

20 items: a lot for state lawmakers to do in one month of a special session. But with days before it starts, they’re adding to their workload. We’ll have the lowdown. Plus, for many small Texas communities, Walmart’s the biggest game in town. But what happens when the big box store shutters its doors? Today, a tale of two cities. And when the Texas governor sent the guard to the border, he didn’t mean the Rio Grande. The Red River rivalry that almost became a literal war between the states. And why if you’re a Texan, we bet you haven’t heard about it. Those stories and a whole lot more today on the Texas Standard:

Big 12 Football

Big 12 conference play starts this weekend with Oklahoma State at Texas and TCU at Texas Tech. That was the inspiration for this week’s Typewriter Rodeo poem by Kari Anne Roy.

Green Room: Come and Take It!

Come and Take It!’ It’s more than just a motto on an historic Texas flag: it’s a rallying cry that resonates with the independent spirit of the Lone Star state. Little wonder, then, that politicians are invoking the phrase in a growing protest over what some ranchers see as a ‘land grab’ by the federal Bureau of Land Management. Jim Malewitz of the Texas Tribune recently visited the land in dispute–and he says the case may alter the Red River border between Texas and Oklahoma.